HÃ¥kon Wium Lie:
> Also sprach Christoph PÃ¤per:
>
> I've been working on a proposal for this based on extending the
> 'font-variant' property.
Might be the best approach.
I've had a look at the Open Type layout tag registry at Microsoft
<http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/> and will mention some
of the tags I found there.
> font-variant-caps: normal | smallcaps
acronym {font-variant-caps: smallcaps /* c2sc wanted */}
acronym {font-variant-caps: petitecaps /* c2pc wanted */}
.author {font-variant-caps: smallcaps /* smcp wanted */}
.author {font-variant-caps: petitecaps /* pcap wanted */}
Petite caps are of course even rarer than small caps.
Despite the analog name I think unicase |unic| would belong here to,
not in |text-transform|.
> font-variant-digits: normal | oldstyle | lining
> font-variant-width: normal | proportional | monospace
You said in a followup message this would primarily be used for
digits, but what if a font has a full-featured monospace variant?
Would this property also be used for CJKV text to select
(horizontally) full |fwid|, half |hwid/halt|, quarter |hwid|, third
em |twid| and proportional |pwid/palt| forms?
| monospace | proportional
---------+-----------+-------------
oldstyle | onum tnum | onum pnum
lining | lnum tnum | lnum pnum
Slashed zero |zero| is only available with lining figures |lnum|,
that would make six types (not counting localised digits). "Old
style" may be standard jargon, but I find it's a biased name to avoid.
> font-variant-swash: normal | swash
There are font families that include serif and sans-serif variants,
some even semi-serif ones. Although these are still put in separate
files, you might consider combining their selection with that of
swashes, because they are really only very large serifs.
> font-variant-ligatures: normal | standard | alternate
There are standard |liga|, contextual |clig|, discretionary |dlig|,
historical |hlig| and required |rlig| ligatures possible in Open
Type, as well as several "diacritic" ligatures for complex (esp.
Indic) scripts, e.g. |abvs/blwf/pres/psts/vatu|.
Does this include fractions?
> Some OpenType fonts support a wider range of alternate glyphs (e.g.,
> titling-alternates | historical-alternates | ligatures |
> alternate-ligatures | digits-monospaced | digits-proportional |
> digits-lining). Should any of these be supported?
There should be at least another property for selecting alternate /
historical / localised forms, but I don't know what its values would
be (and how they would map to OT features).